How to Use Medium: The Complete Guide to Medium for Marketers

Imagine starting a blog with zero overhead. Imagine having a place online to write your thoughts, tips, and learnings and share with a built-in audience and an immediate potential for viral traffic. Imagine a really great writing app.

This is Medium, a blogging platform from the creator of Blogger and Twitter. It’s slick and snappy and could very well be worth a deeper look for digital marketers and first-time bloggers.

We’ve enjoyed experimenting with the best way to use Medium here at Buffer, and we’re eager to learn more about what the best practices might be for helping the Medium community and engaging with an audience. If you’re new to Medium, I’ve collected an overview of resources here in this post, and for those who have been Medium users already, I’ve added several tips and learnings that we’ve discovered along the way.

The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Medium

What is Medium?

Medium is a place to write.

One discussion that comes up often about Medium is whether it strives to be a platform or a publisher, i.e. a place for others to share what they think (like Twitter) or a place for Medium to share what it thinks (like BuzzFeed).

The answer isn’t all that important for marketers. Know this, Medium is a cool new place to share your writing or to start your writing, as easy as can be.

How it works—Medium for writers

Anyone (or any brand) can sign up for a free Medium account and start writing.

Writers can publish individual, stand-alone posts or contribute to publications of curated stories or curate a publication themselves.

Posts – Anything goes with the posts on Medium. Written by journalists, bloggers, companies, and brands, the articles on Medium range from short-form to long-form, light to deep, full posts or teasers of existing content elsewhere. The topics cover just about anything.

Here are a few popular Medium posts that highlight the variety of content on the network.

How it works—Medium for readers

You’ll find a host of similarities between Medium and anywhere else you read content online. At Medium, you still have the ability to comment on (with a twist), recommend, and share posts, with a few added elements that are unique to Medium.

Find and follow – You can follow individual writers and publications, and the more you follow, the more variety you’ll see on your homepage. The Medium homepage displays recent and popular stories from the writers and publications you follow.

Comment – Medium’s unique approach to comments allows you to leave notes in the margins of the story at the exact location you choose.

Here’re a couple of neat ways to use notes:

Request notes before you publish. You can invite collaborators and editors to look at your post before hitting publish. These folks can then add notes throughout the article, much like a collaborative document in Google Drive for instance. Bonus: Anyone who contributes to your final article gets a nice automatic mention at the end.

Use notes as footnotes. You can leave comments on your own articles, treating these notes as footnotes with extra context.

Formatting tips

Medium is both a beautiful writing experience for the writers and a beautiful reading experience for readers. Here are a few great example articles that highlight the storytelling design elements you can include in your Medium post.

1. Medium is basing discovery of your content on whether or not people have read it. Not hits, not sexy headlines. Readability, not gimmicks or tricks, wins.

2. Do you notice how Medium, on its dashboard and elsewhere, does not refer to what you write as blog posts, or content? It calls them stories, and that’s the key here. Medium wants your stories.

One way that Medium emphasizes this focus on readers is in its ubiquitous display of reading time on all posts. Readers can know immediately how much is required of them to read through an entire story.

For writers, Medium shows you a 30-day snapshot of all your posts and their views, reads, and recommendations. You can also drill down further into each post to see where the traffic came from.

Views – How many people saw your post

Reads – How many people saw your post and took the time to read it

Read ratio – How many people actually read your post out of all those who saw it

Recommendations – The number of people who recommend your post

Each of these factors works into the Medium algorithm, which helps determine the posts that get featured around the site and in email digests.

Ctrl + : = brings up the shortcut menu with most of the keyboard shortcuts (not all).

In addition, Medium supports third party embeds, meaning you can share a URL from a favorite service and the media will be automatically included (in a smooth design) inside your post. Medium supports the following third-party sites:

Should you use Medium for your writing?

(All users by default follow the Editors Picks collection, which has 651k followers, we can assume the number is somewhere around there.)

For those just starting out with a blog, Medium has a huge built-in audience. It cuts out the pressure of setting up and maintaining your own blog, and the potential for a viral hit appears to be great with the mechanisms and audience already in place.

For those who are new to blogging, Medium is a great choice to get started.

For those who already have a blogging presence online, there’s likely more to consider.

One of the most interesting discussions I’ve heard on the topic is the idea of sharecropping (HT to Julie Neidlinger for the term). Sharecropping is publishing some place you don’t control.

I try to only publish uncompensated work on platforms that I own myself. I’ll post something to my own blog, for example, rather than have it run for free on the Huffington Post or Medium, because I want people to at least see my name at the top of the site, and perhaps look at more of my work—which is an advantage I don’t enjoy if I write for free on someone else’s site.

Should you join Medium if you have a separate, owned channel to share your writing? I can definitely see the case for either way, and as you’ll read below, there may even be some good go-between options that cover both sides.

The Medium Guide for Marketers

The amount of traffic you can expect on a new post

What kind of traffic can you expect to get from Medium?

Actual numbers on this are a bit hard to come by. A few folks have been kind to share their stats, and I’ve bundled up all the stats from our various team member posts here at Buffer to help give you an idea of the volume that’s out there at Medium.

A few of the posts we’ve written have taken off more so than others. There’s a pretty good representation of a variety of success here in the list. Take a look.

How well does content do on Medium? Or, does it do well enough to publish your stuff there?

The answer will likely depend on what you’re able to get on your personal blog.

Within 6 hours my post on Medium had surpassed the average number of views a post on my site would get in its entire lifetime. Within 24 hours those numbers quadrupled.

How to write a Medium headline

Another unique part of Medium is the way that headlines are built. The SEO headline is less common on Medium than on other blogs around the Internet. Since content is found inside the network, it’s more about writing a headline that resonates with the reader.

For this reason, the Top 100 list of Medium posts will have a wide assortment of different types of headlines.

How to

Full sentences

Super short

Super long

I pulled a list of the character counts for the Top 100 stories from January and found that the average length is 42 characters. For reference, this headline from the Top 100 is 41 characters:

I Almost Let My Failed Startup Destroy Me

And of course, one of our best headline tips for headlines anywhere (blogs or tweets, etc.) is that your first three words and your last three words will be noticed the most. Make those six words count.

The average length of the most-read stories

Likewise, I also looked at the reading lengths of the Top 100 Medium stories from January. Since reading time carries such an emphasis on the network, it might seem that there’d be a good recommendation on exactly how long to write a Medium post.

The average length of a Top 100 post: 7.25 minutes

There was a huge amount of variety on this list as well (the median was 6 minutes). In the Top 10, there were posts as short as 3 minutes and as long as 28.

Also, some of the best advice on length, timing, etc. with Medium posts comes from the Medium data team. There is a direct correlation to how long people spend on their posts and how well the posts perform. Quality trumps all.

5 Growth Hacks for Medium

1. Repost your content on Medium

One of the most obvious growth hacks—and one that we’ve tried ourselves at Buffer—is to repost your content on Medium. You expose it to a new audience and give it a chance to gain traction anew.

2. Link back to your website or blog

Medium gives you huge amounts of creative liberties with the way you create your posts. One interesting method that I’ve seen used a lot is to leverage the end of your post as a place to link back and share a call-to-action or a referral to your blog.

KISSmetrics shared a neat example from Raymmar Tirado who links to his website at the end of each article, and he sometimes includes links to his site in the middle of his posts.

Tirado says:

[One thing I appreciate about Medium] is the ability to link to content outside of Medium inside of my articles. This allows me to drive little pockets of highly engaged traffic to places on my website that correlate with the information inside of the article.

You can also think about adding a CTA to follow on social media or join an emailing list or try out a new product/download.

4. Explore visual content

Medium is for writers. Writers can be visual artists.

Some of the popular content on Medium amounts to little more than a cartoon or series of images. This visual content is striking in its place beside written content. It looks great beside articles of 5 to 7 minutes, while it stands at 2.

Schedule, publish & analyze your posts across the top social networks, all in one place.

Oh! I re-started blogging on Medium and then I dedicated a whole ode to it 🙂
It got 18 recs and 150+ views on that without any effort. It’s amazing how the community embraces you there! I love it.
Thanks for sharing the tips, Kevan!

Half a minute read: It’s 3 am. My wife and kid are asleep. While surfing, I literally stumbled upon my only Medium post from a year ago, which I kind of forgot about, so it was almost a message-in-a-bottle experience! Tomorrow I’ll retype my high school short film screenplay (if I find it:) And why am I writing this here? I’ve found your medium story warm. Thx. Here’s mine: https://medium.com/@bro4real/fake-smile-9ae0332e4142

Alison

A really good website. I found a lot of useful information. Definitely will come back and read your future articles.http://www.friv2online.live

Shannon Lewis

Does Medium support the rel=canonical tag? If not won’t Google penalize you for duplicate content on your website? How do you get around that?

Hey Shannon! Great question! Not sure how others are doing this, but we tend to do more recruitment type posts on Medium. We’ll actually publish them there first and then add canonical tags on our own site. So a bit unorthodox, but that’s how we’re doing it. 🙂

Shannon Lewis

thanks. I am curious to hear how other are doing it as well. I keep reading about reposting your content and how it’s a great way to increase traffic, but then I hear the horror stories of Google penalizing you for it if the rel=canonical tag isn’t used.

On a search, Google isn’t going to show both posts. They’d rank the post that has higher authority. I understand they probably won’t penalize you unless you’re spam posting or keyword stuffing.

The other consideration is where you expect to get your traffic from. If I can get 100 referrals from Medium on a duplicate post, where I might only get 10 from Google search results to a post on my blog, I’m going to take the risk of duplicating a post on Medium.

Publish on the site you want to show in Google FIRST. Then a day or two later publish elsewhere. I cross-post to medium and syndicate on 5-10 other sites (depending on the piece) and Google doesn’t publish. It tends to lead with the URL the story first appeared unless the piece goes crazy on another publication.

To quote Neil “What I learned is that reposting your content on sites more authoritative than yours, even if you publish it first on your blog and have them link back, can cause a duplicate content penalty.”

But it sounds like folks have been doing this successfully so I think I will give it a try.

Hi there Blake! Thanks for the question. We often post new, original content to our Medium publication then re-post to our own blog with canonical tags.

In my experience, we’re somewhat unique in doing that. I more often see it happening in reverse – first on your own blog, then on Medium.

I haven’t quite seen any research on which type of content – reposted vs. original – does better. My intuition is that original content would do slightly better, although I’d imagine the difference wouldn’t be significant. Hope this helps!

I use medium for most things I write that aren’t exclusive to another publication. I did a test last weekend and instead of posting an article directly into my newsletter, I shared a wind-up and a link to the post on medium.

End result was the post hitting #2 on all of medium and 25,000 views in a few days. I think when you combine the traction you can get from your audience, with the traction high ranking stories get on medium, it can be a wonderful thing.

Great post! The mistake that I was doing on Medium was that I was posting original content on medium and giving a link of it on my personal blog. Reversed the strategy now. Posting on my blog and then cross posting it on medium. Works better now.

Recently started posting on Medium while the blog is under construction. I’ve seen varied action, and although some of that has to do with how often/where I publicize it, my favorite feature in the stats is the read rate.

For example, one of my popular posts has 98 views, but only about 50% of folks have gotten all the way through it.

Another one of my less popular posts has under 40 views, but 80% of people read all the way to the end. (That one is also my most recommended post.)

They are both about the same length, so this allows me to examine what I’ve done differently (if anything) that keeps people on the hook. I love that!

Hi there Khurt! Sorry this topic missed the mark for you. I can definitely see how approaching Medium from a marketing angle might feel a bit off from the “just write” mindset. Thanks for sharing this perspective!

I have had the opposite experience to most people. I have been putting all of my blog posts on Medium with nothing? Nada. Not even one view. Just don’t know what I”m doing wrong? I think my Blog Active Patience is OK and my pictures are good too, I just don’t see what everyone else see’s in Medium.

Hi Nicole! Thanks for the comment. Sorry to hear you’ve yet to see much impact from Medium. My sense is that with Medium being a relatively newer channel that there could be quite the wide range of experiences here for bloggers. I’d love to know if you notice any change if you continue to write and share!

How can you create a publication for your brand? Since there is no login option to medium apart from Twitter and Facebook?

And how do you customise your profile into something cool, like what you’ve done here: https://medium.com/buffer-posts — instead of the usual layout of latest stories, recommends, etc?

Thanks!

Nate Briggs

I’m just mystified by what Medium is supposed to do – and information about the machinery is thin. It’s my perception that only material recommended by Medium staff – meaning material written by them – appears on the “main feed”. Everything else gets shelved in the “stacks”, like a library. It can be located…but it’s not highly visible.

True or not true: to get on the main feed – to get exposure – you have to be working for Medium?

Alison

Thanks for allowing me to speak my opinion on this topic. I hope your shares, will always be interesting in the future. Thanks again to the team Bufferapp.http://www.juegosfriv.live

Great article Kevan. I am curious how this affects SEO if you are re-posting to Medium from your own blog. Medium doesn’t appear to have a canonical option. I know a lot of guys reposting on there simply include a link back to original… But that is kind of risky. You are hoping that Google will figure out based on dates when it crawls that your blog has the original content still. I would hate to put effort into an article just for Medium to overtake the ranking for the post… since their domain authority is so crazy high.

Would you say there was an optimum time of day or week to post on Medium, I know you mentioned posting once a day.

Thanks

Rebecca

DenyDeea

Great information. I recently found your website and I read your articles. I thought I would leave my first comment. Thank you and we hope that God will help us!http://www.juegosfriv2017.link

Jordan T. McBride

Kevan thank you for this article. It really answered all the question marks I had about Medium from a Marketer stand-point.

Timothy Woods

Hey Buffer guys,

I recently began using Medium. just one thing though that I am not sure of (and petrified of) – will republishing from your blog or wherever, on Medium not be penalized by Google? Especially if there are backlinks in there, will it not be the case that Google will see there is duplicate content and punish the site involved and rank Medium higher for the post as it has a stronger domain? I’ve seen some conflicting views on republishing and if it actually detrimentally affects your rank or not. Would be brilliant of you can shed some light on it. Thanks

Timothy, there’s no penalty at all for having the same content on different websites. The only penalty with respect to duplicate content is if you’re trying to deliberately hoodwink Google by having very similar content on lots of different pages on your own website (eg. just changing a keyword on each one).

However, if Google finds two or more versions of the same content out there, it will judge which it deems to be the original, and display that one, ignoring the other. The risk is that if you republish directly from your blog onto Medium, that they may give the credit for the content to Medium – i.e. display that version, rather than the version on your own blog.

You can mitigate this by linking back to the original blog post from the Medium version, but it’s not guaranteed.

My preferred approach is to repurpose the blog content for Medium. That way I stand the chance of both (different) versions of the content gaining traction in search independently.

Plus, it’s a different environment, and what might work well on your blog might not work as well with Medium’s audience. For example, 2000+ words might be best for your blog, but 1000-1500+ words might gain most engagement on Medium.

If you aren’t sure about the specifics of canonical links, the Medium import tool does it automatically for you.

CimexDan

Does a canonical link apply when the content’s sitting on a different domain?

Alison

I like this a lot. Thank you for sharing. I’m always looking for
upcycles like this. In the end, you don’t know it was a shipping pallet
to begin with!http://www.juegosfriv2018.live

Alison

Everything is fine, am happy of your blog. Thanks admin for sharing the unique content, you have done a great job I appreciate your effort and I hope you will get more positive comments from the web users.http://www.juegosdefriv.live

This is an informative post review. I am so pleased to get this post article and nice information. I was looking forward to get such a post which is very helpful to us. A big thank for posting this article in this website. Keep it up.http://www.friv.live

is it just me or do you also find it confusing and illogical that Comments are called Articles on my profile in Medium. When I look at my articles I have to mentally separate which ones are just comments and which are articles. I get that by commenting I am part of a conversation, however, I think there must be a billion better ways to create and explore that idea rather than just dumping comments on others articles together with my articles that I start. I like the editing of Medium (except the no full screen image and the new editing is a few steps backwards) but I hope this isn’t our most popular blogging platform because the commenting system is crazy, all I do is click ‘more comments’ to see another two. I also find it a labyrinth to simply see comments on an article and reveal the comments that are replies of another comment. I understand that Medium is trying to solve the staggered reply problem (and timeline issues) but I think they made it worse.

Dude, I loved this article! You have been so thorough here. You even have a perfect image to pin this to a pinterest board…..dang I love you.

justseemobileapp

Chennai Tailoring Institute Of High Quality Commercial Diploma Courses In Chennai,Chennai Tailoring Institute teaches everything about tailoring i.e., Cutting, stiching, making clothes, Fashion Garment Designing, Embroidery, Pattern Making etc.The goal of this institute is that the students of these courses will be self employed.Am working in Fashion Designing Classes in Chennai

Wonderful! You’re ideal. Ally of Riley is joy, which retains constructive each moment of Riley’s existence as it was so challenging to get used to new everyday living in San Francisco. Feelings are fighting regarding how to in to school, during the cinema or maybe how to navigate from the town. I assure that it is much too humorous. Lol grin emoticon As Riley is eleven several years old she likes it but there’s extremely chaos in her head. In that funny game titles you need to help Riley God her feelings to do day-to-day issues and become optimistic.http://insideoutgames77.com/inside-out-riley-farm/

Jessie Beck

Question about publications: we work with a group of freelancers (some of whom are no longer with us, and most of whom aren’t active on Medium, sadly) and want to republish their work on our publication. Is it OK to have our authorship remain as our brand name? Or should we really try to get human names attached to each post?

In other words, when you come to our publication, you’ll see that all posts are authored by the brand itself — not “Jessie Beck”. Is that OK?

More mature online games experienced a lot more written content to their UI’s. Diablo experienced it’s wellness be represented by a spherical vial that would empty when you misplaced wellbeing. http://curvefever.net/elsafrozen/baby-elsa-bathing/ That appears great. That could look great in High definition. Which was by no means manufactured in High definition simply because builders switched to minimalist metro retina

Looks like I’m a little late to the party 😉 …great post! A lot of good information here. Is there a place to find all Medium publications, or search for Medium publications related to specific industries?

Excellent article! It answered a ton of questions I had about the platform.

One question that you touched on sort of, but not exactly:
Is it a good or bad idea to write a blog post on your own site, then copy paste it (fixing formatting, of course) to the Medium platform? If you did, would it be bad to write “Originally posted at mywebsite.com”?

Thanks again! I’m excited to get started using Medium! 🙂

Alvar Abrahan

I’m keen on your web site’s articles and also subjects. Your articles is
quite useful, I want to give many my own pals for a web site. I want to
appreciate it. http://www.juegosfriv40.com

kin

Very interesting blog. Alot of blogs I see these days don’t really provide anything that I’m interested in, but I’m most definately interested in this one. Just thought that I would post and let you know. happy wheels

age of war

The war between humans, orcs and elves continues tank trouble . Lead your race through a series of epic battles, using your crossbow to fend off foes and sending out units to destroy castleshappy wheels . Researching and upgrading wisely will be crucial to your success! There are 5 ages total and each one will bring you new units to train to fight in the war for you cause.earn to die game Whatever you do, don’t neglect your home base because you cannot repair it and once it is destroyed, you lose! Age of War is the first game of the series and really sets the tone for the Age of War games earn to die for you. Also try out the Age of Defense series as it is pretty similar.

In this game, you start at the cavern men’s age, then evolvetank trouble game! There is a total of 5 ages, each with its units and turrets. Take control of 16 different units and 15 different turrets to defend your base and destroy your enemy.

The goal of the game also differs depending on the level. In most levels the goal is to reach a finish line or to collect tokens. Many levels feature alternate or nonexistent goals for the player. The game controls are shown just under gold mine. Movement mechanisms primarily include acceleration and tilting controls.

It consists of a total of 17 levels and the challenge you face in each level increases as you go up. unfair mario The game basically has a red ball that has to be moved across the various obstacles in its path to the goal.

sahil sharma

How do write a blog post series on medium. Eg. I dont want a full tutorial in one post I want to divide it into several parts. How to do that. I currently do that by using titles of the posts like Part1 Part2 etc. Is there more elegant way to do it? Because in the current scenaria , I cant really add posts in a specific order

Alison

Very useful article. I found so many interesting things in your website especially this thread. Really great your article.http://www.juegosfriv2017.link

Nick Garland

Few days ago i integrated IFTTT with Medium , Medium To Twitter and so.
And when i checked my twitter profile there was freaking 1200+ tweets within few hours.French Open 2016

Thanks very much mate Really was useful. Few days ago i integrated IFTTT with Medium , Medium To Twitter and so.
And when i checked my twitter profile there was freaking 1200+ tweets within few hours.French Open Live

justseeseo

We are Best Birthday Cake Shops in Coimbatore offering quality ingredients and fresh cream to guarantee its taste, provided cake is highly valued for its amazing freshness and taste.Am working in Birthday Cakes in Coimbatore.

justseeseo

We are the most preferable Ice Cream manufacturer in Chennai among customers. We offers an excellent quality of various flavors of ice creams which have are very tasty.Am working in Ice Cream Manufacturers in Chennai.

Having problem with your iPhone? Looking for a reliable and authentic iPhone service center in your Town? You have come to right place. iTools Mobile Service Center is the best service center for iPhone repairs located in Chennai. Am working in Iphone Mobile Service Centre in Chennai.

justseeseo

JPR Ladders, a well-known Aluminium Scaffolding Hire in Chennai offering to our valuable clients with best price. We ensure that our customers are fully satisfied by our Quality Service, Speedy Solutions and Transparency. Am working in Aluminium Ladder Manufacturer in Chennai.

Great read, but it still leaves the question I came in with unanswered….Can you login to Medium with BOTH Twitter or Facebook, or do you have to choose? When I tried to add my FB to my Medium, it gave me an error message. So I logged out of Medium and came back in with FB. Then in settings, I tried to connect Twitter and it gave me the same error message. So methinks that we are supposed to choose which audience to go with? But they are different for me, so I find this frustrating.

I used to be more than happy to search out this internet-site.I wanted to thanks on your time for this wonderful read!! I undoubtedly having fun with every little little bit of it and I’ve you bookmarked to take a look at new stuff you weblog post.

Adytssu Cretsu

This is an informative post review. I am so pleased to get this post article and nice information. I was looking forward to get such a post which is very helpful to us. A big thank for posting this article in this website. Keep it up.http://www.frivgames.live/

Nice blog posting..keep posting really very interesting to this article thanks for sharingiphone service center

Uttara Vaidya

Hello All,
One of the reasons I started writing on Medium is to get some visibility and backlinking for my business website. Does any one of you know whether the links on my post to my website will be a do-follow backlink that will help boost my SEO? Appreciate your feedback!

One of our favorite tips on getting more value out of social media: Share your blog posts and articles more than once. We’ve come up with a sharing schedule for every new blog post that publishes on the Buffer blog—sharing the post when it publishes, later the same day, the next day, later in the […]